Via CoolTool.Com comes this story illustrating the utter stupidity of digital rights management schemes that some companies are starting to build into MP3 players.

In this case ZDNet’s Josh Taylor reviewed Toshiba’s MobilPhile MP3 player. The MobilPhile is Toshiba’s answer to the iPod and features a 5 gig. hard drive and a USB 2.0 connection which can theoretically pump MP3s onto the player at up to 480mbs per second.

But Toshiba decided to cripple the MobilPhile with DRM management. Rather than just copying MP3s from your home machine or laptop to the MobilPhile, first you have to run the MP3s through a program that encrypts them and makes it impossible to transfer the MP3s back to a different machine.

And in Taylor’s test, completely eliminated the advantage of using USB 2.0 rather than USB 1.1. Taylor copied an album to the MobilPhile using USB 1.1 — it took 53 seconds. Switching to USB 2.0 still took 48 seconds for the same operation. Wow, a 40-fold theoretical advantage in throughput yields an astounding 5 second advantage in performance.

You can drag and drop files to the MobilPhile, but the catch is you can’t listen to MP3 files on the device if they are moved in this straightforward way. But dragging and dropping the album took under 5 seconds over a USB 2.0 connection.

Thanks Toshiba!

Fox News ran story a couple weeks ago about clubs and organizations dedicated to characters and stories ranging from Sherlock Holmes to Alice in Wonderland to The Wizard of Oz.

I know a little bit about such obsessive fandom since I’m almost finished posting electronic versions of all of the public domain Wizard of Oz books to my site, including a nice search form.

One of the interesting things about such fandom is it contradicts an argument made by copyright holders who want copyrights that do not have meaningful expiration dates (yes, they may expire eventually, but if it is not for another 150 years, then it is essentially meaningless IMO). An argument offered in favor of such long copyright terms is that without them there is no incentive to preserve copyrighted material. Once the copyright runs out on books like The Wizard of Oz or Alice In Wonderland or the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, then the books themselves run the risk of being lost forever because nobody has a financial interest in preserving them.

In reality, of course, the opposite is true. Obscure books that are in the public domain are, in fact, much easier to find than are obscure books that are still technically copyrighted.

For The Wizard of Oz or the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, there are hundreds and hundreds of sites online where the full text of these books can be found — and since the copyright has expired, freely copied (as I have done). Were The Wizard of Oz still copyrighted, it would probably not be online at all — in fact, many of the authorized Oz books written after L. Frank Baum’s death are not available online at all to my knowledge.

In fact there are thousands and thousands of books written in the early part of the 20th century that haven’t been published or sold in decades that are not available online precisely because they are technically still copyrighted even if it is by now all but impossible to determine who the rights holder is. The 1998 extension to the copyright act all but guaranteed that those books will likely not be available online until at least 2015 or so (and, by then, copyright holders will inevitably be asking for additional extensions).

The purpose of the copyright was to grant limited monopolies to authors in order to encourage the production of books and other works. Unfortunately, over the past couple centuries the idea that such monopolies should be limited has largely been thrown out the window.

The weblog community’s celeb o’ the moment writes,

The Shah’s White Revolution for radical social & economic change caused major problems. He was telling his people to do things they’d never done—he told the women to remove their veils! Iran’s leader backstepped on their entire way of life in favor of these huge industries and the customs they brought. Imagine if our leaders sacrificed our way of life, our individual liberties just because they were smitten with some huge corporation that made them rich? Read that again.

Yeah, just imagine some nasty corporation asking that a country treat women with dignity and respect. I wasn’t aware that libertarians now considered mandatory veil wearing for women to be a “civil liberty.”

When Kohmeini took power, thousands of women took to the street to protest a new order demanding they go back to wearing the veils. Soldiers were called out and fired shots into the air where the women were marching.

But at least (apparently) they weren’t beholden to any corporation or effort to Westernize (which was the real motivation behind the Shah’s edict).

Normally I’m not interested in reading any about the Backstreet Boys, but The New York Times had a fascinating look at the group’s rise and fall.

But the article is really about the shady business dealings in the recording industry. Even though their CD “Backstreet Boys” sold millions of copies in Europe and 10 million copies in the United States, between 1993 and 1998 the band members only received $300,000 total in royalties due to the slippery accounting methods used by record companies (the movie and record industry accounting practices make WorldCom and Enron look honest in comparison).

Their original manager, for example, cleverly booked his expenses against the band’s royalties, so while he was making millions, they were earning peanuts. He also crafted their original contract in such a way that he was a member of the group, so he paid himself as the manager and then paid himself again by taking a share of the royalties as a member of the group.

They get out of that contract thank to a small management company called the Firm which then uses the Backstreet Boys to build its own business, including entering into deals which clearly benefit the management company but also help kill the band’s career. (They sold the “Black and Blue” tour to Clear Channel which was great for the Firm but pissed off a lot of the group’s fans because it meant huge ticket prices and, in many cases, poor ticket sales as a result).

Backstreet Boys music sucks as far as I’m concerned, but the behind the scenes story is fascinating.